by Sydney Lea

Our good friend Mark forwarded your lovely
          “Cirrus” soon after you died.
                    I’d have wept at it even if you’d been alive.

We are bound to honor your words: let my epitaph be /
          the glance, the edge, /the mist.
                    You were a mensch to the very last,

your poem touched by that rare wit I’ll forever
          connect with you, but to me
                    it’s the splendid late – life humility —

among the poets a quality much rarer —
          that makes you dearer.  Tonight,
                    having read you, I slip back to meeting The Blue Notes.

They were then no longer The Charlemagnes,

          but Teddy Pendergrass
                    wasn’t their lead yet.  I was in those days

a regular at that bar at 5th & Pine,
          and every visit was worth
                    every penny, its jukebox the best on earth.

One night I shook the hand of the soul group’s founder.
          I actually met Harold Melvin,
                    which seemed an unmerited blessing.

He’d come into the place with two of the other singers,
          their names unremembered now.
                    They stood by the door and then broke out

in an a cappella version of “Out and Let Me
          Cry.”  ’65.  All hell
                    was breaking loose, Dr. King in jail,
war burgeoning.  The three men’s harmony —
          though it’s only now I can sense
                    what it was that I saw come to pass —

epitomized the astonishing impulse to song
          against all the reasons to cry.
                    You too had reasons — and sang.  Today,

I long to sing back to you, friend,   somewhere along
          the edges,   among the mists.
                    I met you,   I heard you for years,   Jack.   I was blessed.

by Alexander Etheridge

Sudden winter, unfashionably cold rain —
You may know this, changed now into everywhere
by the shadow’s knick.

And word for November frigid and rain, we waiting for the murk       to
crystallize through oblique semiosis made
bizarrely decipherable by the white left on the
page.  Us in rooms where the wasting met you years later, years           ago (a
high startled math suggests all time is at
once, and one moment’s twitch, eternal — every thing heaped up        and cross–
hatched, the immensity of its scale and
mass quicker than a face in the knives) Us still 90 proof summer

on your back porch, a sound of ancient sparks
under scar tissue.
I was see – through and scared
but you lifted heavy girders up from the scattering
and bolted them into place,
reminded me I was there, that we were
there looking when
June dusk, that to earn just seconds in the tower means we’ll be          ripped and
scalded (expulsions of bone and light / dad’s arc of descent.)  Hour and grain of
tidal sediment, the invisible book trick (or that line I          had about sawing off my
left leg) — the hard
sonics you know and knew I

didn’t know at all.  We’re still
there, at once here too and now, an
us, but I can’t get back to you then.
I wanted to tell you something
but the shape of its number had changed.
I recall, but I can’t know if you’re dead
or ever — hand in subtle flight,
listening, telling me look with a sleepless ear
for signs of the other world.

by Carol Westberg

       It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
                                              — Wallace Stevens

Anxiety shows up again in the wrong shoes,
feet ablaze, her notorious fingers picking at scabs
long vanished from the surface of skin
once smooth as a cat’s eye but not from a psyche
so easily swayed by rumor of sun or storm,
wasps, lurid flames from neighbors and strangers,
rye bread in the oven or not, the way the girl
imagined the boy’s glance sized her up,
a huge balloon of disdain or praise rising white or red.
Tonight she sleeps but fitfully after falling mercifully
fast into nothing she can remember, waking
to the 3:00 a.m. glowing fluorescent green above
the bookshelf.  How long, she wonders,
will books be made of paper, glue, and ink?
Carson, Rumi, Augustine, Brodsky, Cortazar —
her collection breathes no place else in the universe
like the wild library of anxieties she despairs
to enumerate.  Why can’t she let go of the laundry,
the will, the family photos waiting a child’s lifetime
for her to sort.  Not even she wants to read
her litany of undone chores as kindred packrats
exhaust our earth while millions of hungering souls
still can’t read themselves to sleep.

by Carol Westberg

An eagle, the boy said,
or a loon.  Next time
I might be moss
or stone or a stream
carrying on.